Data from this international partnership will assist biologists in protecting the herds they study.
Herds of woolly mammoth once roamed the span of the Northern Hemisphere, from the British Isles across the Bering land bridge to the eastern shores of North America. Then, about 4000 years ago, the last mammoth died.
Enough of their remains were preserved in the icy tundra to reveal a somber truth: On a generational time scale, the creatures disappeared suddenly and catastrophically. The jury is out on whether a changing climate, hunting by humans, or something else is most to blame—but we do know that the mammoth’s closest relative, the elephant, is undergoing a similar population crash today, driven by similar threats.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimates that in just the past century, the number of living African savanna elephants has been reduced by 60%. Their sister species, African forest elephants, have dwindled by an astonishing 86% and are now listed as “critically endangered.”
Humans have the power to halt this collapse into extinction. But to do it, we need more data. “At the moment, we actually have more genomic data for woolly mammoths than we do for living elephants,” says Patrícia Pečnerová, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Copenhagen. “And that should change.”
Pečnerová wrote her PhD thesis on mammoth paleogenomics and is now a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow at the university’s Department of Biology and a National Geographic Explorer. She got in touch with Mrinalini Erkenswick Watsa, a conservation scientist with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (SDZWA), to begin forming a partnership. Its vision: To create an atlas of elephant genome diversity across Africa, which could be used to make field conservation tools for the people and communities who come into direct contact with the animals, and thus have the most power to help them.
Such a partnership would require several players: someone to gather biological samples, someone to sequence them, someone to analyze the data and develop the atlas, and someone to deploy tools based on it in the field—and everyone involved must understand the challenges at hand.
A new genomic atlas could help save endangered elephants
Herds of woolly mammoth once roamed the span of the Northern Hemisphere, from the British Isles across the Bering land bridge to the eastern shores of North America. Then, about 4000 years ago, the last mammoth died.
Enough of their remains were preserved in the icy tundra to reveal a somber truth: On a generational time scale, the creatures disappeared suddenly and catastrophically. The jury is out on whether a changing climate, hunting by humans, or something else is most to blame—but we do know that the mammoth’s closest relative, the elephant, is undergoing a similar population crash today, driven by similar threats.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimates that in just the past century, the number of living African savanna elephants has been reduced by 60%. Their sister species, African forest elephants, have dwindled by an astonishing 86% and are now listed as “critically endangered.”
Humans have the power to halt this collapse into extinction. But to do it, we need more data. “At the moment, we actually have more genomic data for woolly mammoths than we do for living elephants,” says Patrícia Pečnerová, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Copenhagen. “And that should change.”
Pečnerová wrote her PhD thesis on mammoth paleogenomics and is now a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow at the university’s Department of Biology and a National Geographic Explorer. She got in touch with Mrinalini Erkenswick Watsa, a conservation scientist with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (SDZWA), to begin forming a partnership. Its vision: To create an atlas of elephant genome diversity across Africa, which could be used to make field conservation tools for the people and communities who come into direct contact with the animals, and thus have the most power to help them.
Such a partnership would require several players: someone to gather biological samples, someone to sequence them, someone to analyze the data and develop the atlas, and someone to deploy tools based on it in the field—and everyone involved must understand the challenges at hand.
A new genomic atlas could help save endangered elephants